Windows 2000 P2V blue screens

I recently had two older model Compaq servers blue screen after a P2V conversion. In each case the physical machines had a diagnostic partition (without an assigned drive letter) on disk before the boot/C: partition. While using the VMware Converter this volume was de-selected and not migrated to the virtual machine. In each case the server blue screened with an error “INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE” after the conversion.

At first I believed this error to be caused by that diagnostic partition. I tried to re-run the P2V several times and even tried including the diagnostic partition in my VM. The problem was persistent; no matter how I used the P2V the host (cold clone/block level agent/file level agent/with and without diagnostic partition) this error would occur.

After a couple of attempts I thought I was fighting a lost cause. Finally I stumbled across an article that suggested I had a bad version of scsiport.sys and suggested several methods to replace this file. Since I’m using virtual machines and already had a Windows 2000 VM template, I deployed a copy of my Windows 2000 template and attached my P2Ved C: drive as a second drive in the server. I copied the known working copy of SCSIPORT.SYS from C:\WINNT\System32\Drivers to my second drive (E:\WINNT\System32\Drivers\SCSIPORT.SYS). I then shutdown and removed the second drive from my temporary server and powered on the recently P2Ved guest. Problem solved.